Cancer Diary: Food, Acidity, Cancer, and Confusion
Sometimes it is hard to get an answer from an oncologist in ay you need to understand it. They give you the full onion, but what you need is help in peeling the pieces.
What I have been trying to get my head around is the concept of acidity and cancer. My friend, Julie, a nurse-researcher who is quite respected, claims to have cured her husband of cancer by ensuring that his body provided cancer with an acid-free environment where it could not grow. So, what about that is true?
- Her husband did have stage 3 cancer (stomach).
- Her husband is now cancer free and has been so for a few years.
- Her husband is not young -- in his 60s when cancer struck and in his 70s now (not sure that means anything)
- She did ensure a non-acidic diet for him.
The question remains, though, is whether that diet cured the cancer (or put it into remission) or had any effect on it, i.e. did something else natter instead?
This site agrees with Julie. It claims that "acidic pH leaders to cancer and normal pH can stop cancer in its tracks."
On the other hand, a Quora answer that explains why these claims are bogus also makes sense. I am repeating the Quora response here in full because often the links to Quora responses break:
From Quora
Original Question being answered: “Why is lemon recommended as a cure for cancer when we are told that cancer cells thrive in an acidic environment? We have been told molasses fights cancer in an alkaline environment. Is it true or false?”
There is so much to unpack here. There are multiple bits of misinformation and multiple levels of misunderstanding.
Let’s start with the “acidic environment” of cancer cells.
- There is a fact that has been observed that many, if not most cancer tumor environments—mostly inside the tumor and to a much lesser degree immediately surrounding the tumor site—are “acidic;” that is, with a pH lower than normal body pH of 7.4.
- It is also a fact that many, if not most kinds of cancer and cancer tumor cells have a higher than normal metabolic rate. They use resources, make wastes, grow, and divide more rapidly than typical body cells.
The way that many people have (wrongly) interpreted these observations is that the cancer cells or tumors prefer these acidic environments, may be somehow attracted to them, or might even be caused by them…
BUT this is putting a really big cart before an unwilling horse. The acidic environment is not causing the cancer, the acidic environment is a result of the elevated cancer cell/tumor metabolism. The cancer is causing the environment to become more acidic by pumping out great gobs of hydrogen ions (H+ or protons) by virtue of the accelerated rate of metabolic reactions. ALL of your cells do this as part of a dynamic system that creates a flow of protons, then harvests them to be attached to special chemicals for transport or to be pumped elsewhere. The system is dynamic, but in normal tissues remains “balanced” and the pH of the system has no overall change. Dump more protons than the system can grab back up in that time and the net result is a localized rise in protons (H+) and a lowering of pH…becoming more acidic.
Even if you could (and you really cannot by eating or drinking) add something to the area around the tumor that made it more alkaline, that would not stop the tumor cells from grabbing organic compounds like glucose (and several other carbohydrates), pyruvates, or a number of other common compounds used in a variety of metabolic pathways, and breaking them apart to make ATP—and in the process, running their proton pumps at high speed.
The cancer is the issue here, not the environment.
The other side of this misinformation coin is that you can eat “alkaline” foods that will somehow fix this acidic condition the cancer lives in, thus disabling or even “curing” the cancer.
Firstly, you can see that it is the cancer that causes the acidic environment and no matter what you do—other than directly killing the cancer cells and shrinking that metabolically active tumor—you will not turn off the cancer by trying to alter the “acidity” of the environment. That is thinking through the problem upside-down & backwards. Change the cancer and the environment goes back to normal. Change the environment and the cancer just keeps pumping out “acid” (H+, protons).
Secondly, you simply cannot change your body’s pH by what you eat. You can change the pH of urine a little, because it is a special system that is not metabolic in nature but is eliminating, excreting, urinating out materials removed from the body that are wastes. You can even temporarily and locally alter the pH of saliva a little, but it is a very temporary and localized event that has more of an impact on tooth health and bad breath than it has to do with any other internal processes.
So, measuring the pH of your urine or your saliva tells you pretty much nothing about your overall body pH. Your vascular fluids, blood & lymph, bathe every part of your internal cells and stay in a very narrow band of pH centered at pH=7.4. Go past pH=7.35 on the low end (more acidic) and there is big trouble systemically—your entire body will react negatively. Go the other way past pH=7.45 (more alkaline or “basic”) and you experience a different range of serious issues that different than those from being too low. Your body has a magnificently elegant set of simple and complex mechanisms for keeping your body’s pH balanced…
…And it does not matter what you eat or drink!
[Remember, we are talking in reference to pH, here. Of course it matters what you eat and drink as an overal health consideration, but not regards your body’s (or a cancer tumor’s) pH profile.]
Now, there are some extreme cases in which you CAN cause acidosis or alkalosis in humans, but it is generally associated with specific underlying medical causes or extreme extremes in behavior.
You could eat a basket of lemons today and the internal pH of your body will remain balanced at 7.4.
And Thirdly, the idea that there are “acidic” and “alkaline” foods is based on a misuse of an old food product analysis technique that essentially burns the food and then analyzes the ash left behind. If it has uncombusted minerals left behind that donate H+ in solution, they are “acidic.” If they are more apt to either grab up H+ or donate OH- in solution, then these are considered “alkaline.”
The thing is, your body does not “burn up” these foods and leave ash behind. Our body uses integrated compounds, breaking them apart and recombining the parts in special pathways under a great deal of control (by enzymes and intermediary reactions). It gets minerals not usually in “raw” mineral form (or “ash” form), but attached to other, usually organic, compounds and then inserted into metabolic pathways by intermediaries (coenzymes & cofactors), some we often know as ‘vitamins.‘
Simply put, we do not use the “ash” from foods as isolated “ash” minerals and once in our mouth, it is not a matter of whether the derived “ash” was assayed as acid or alkaline. In any case, it will not impact your body’s pH, much less the pH of the environment surrounding a batch of cancer cells or cancerous tumor.
The bottom line is that you do not alter your body’s pH by eating specific foods. Neither does eating any particular food alter the environment in which a tumor is living.
You cannot cure cancer by eating either lemons or molasses. Both are good food, but neither is a cancer medicine.
So, you tell me? Eliminate acid from your diet or not????
Now that Carl has transitioned to the other realm, I no longer have to wrestle with such confusion. However, others do. When an answer is unclear, here in Cancer Diary, I provide both sides -- and let the researchers keep on researching. If someone researches an answer, please put it on Quora, tweet it, respond to this blog post -- let the world know! The less confusion the better when it comes to cancer.
Read more about Cancer Diary posts HERE.
Blog editor's note: As a memorial to Carl, and simply because it is truly needed, MSI Press is now hosting a web page, Carl's Cancer Compendium, as a one-stop starting point for all things cancer, to make it easier for those with cancer to find answers to questions that can otherwise take hours to track down on the Internet and/or from professionals. The web page is in its infancy but expected to expand into robustness. To that end, it is expanded and updated weekly. As part of this effort, each week, on Monday, this blog will carry an informative, cancer-related story -- and be open to guest posts: Cancer Diary.
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